Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue reunion: Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary’s medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband’s struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she’s never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

“What happens when youthful dreams and ambitions hit the wall? Emily Nemens’s compelling new novel, Clutch, is an exploration of long devoted friendships in such pivotal moments. The life-changing situations and choices leave us aware of both a universal experience and the most private and fragile one. Wise, witty and at times harrowing, Nemens skillfully weaves the lives of these five friends, memorably cemented by time.”—Jill McCorkle, author of Old Crimes

“A sharp, funny, utterly engrossing exploration of the enduring complexity and deep love of long term friendship, Clutch enmeshes you in the particularities, yearning, fears of these five friends, as they try and fail and try again to love and care for one another amidst the endless push and pull, losses and joys of middle life.”—Lynn Steger Strong, author of The Float Test

“Clutch is a powerfully intimate portrait of female friendship, following five college friends through the turbulent landscape of their forties as careers implode, marriages fracture, and dreams reshape themselves in unexpected ways. With razor-sharp insight, humor, and deep compassion, Nemens explores how these women navigate life’s most challenging moments, proving that even when circumstances threaten to tear them apart, the bonds forged in youth can become the foundation for reinvention. This is a bracingly honest and exhilarating novel about the messy, complicated, and essential work of showing up for the people who matter most.”—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

“Clutch is a sharp, heartfelt celebration of modern friendship, positioning it as the backbone of our social lives. Through bold, inventive leaps, Nemens’s prose dazzles, elevating the group chat, and the friend bond, to something sacred and vital. A big-hearted and daring novel from one of our finest creative and critical minds.”—Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You

“Finally, we have a collective noun for a group of aging female friends, and only the great Emily Nemens could’ve declared it. Clutch is hilarious, philosophical, anthropological, polyphonic, with a keen eye for the specific foibles of our present American moment. Nemens is an expert chronicler of the subtle ways women wound each other, and also, the ways they offer love. The way a friendship can carry venom and antidote both. These pages made me laugh and broke my heart—yes, it had me in its clutches.”—Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story

Clutch

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